Cities have long unsettled national authoritarian projects. Yet in many parts of the world, seemingly new and increasingly assertive demonstrations of national state power are being staged in cities with the use of bulldozers, riot police, and border patrols. In India, authoritarian projects of Hindu nationalism are utilizing demolition squads and land‑use regulations as tools of urban control, terrorizing Muslim communities while confronting the messy, multiscalar, and often fiercely democratic regimes that actually govern cities and urban neighborhoods. These authoritarian incursions into cities and urbanizing regions are at once entrenched and emergent, reflecting longstanding governing logics and established repertoires of state power alongside new political configurations forged through projects of muscular ethnonationalism, neoliberal urbanization, devolved governance, and supreme court jurisprudence on evictions and the right to stay put.

Bulldozer Justice in Delhi

On 16 April 2022, a shobha yatra organized by the Hindu right party Bajrang Dal wound through the streets of Jahangirpuri, a predominantly Muslim neighborhood in North Delhi, as part of its Hanuman Jayanti celebrations. The procession included roughly 500 people carrying saffron flags, blasting loud music, and performing martial displays, constituting political theater, and importing into Jahangirpuri a mode of confrontation that had been staged in localities across North India over the preceding weeks.

When parade participants attempted to plant a saffron flag in front of a neighborhood mosque, stone throwing quickly escalated into street fighting, and the yatris transformed from worshippers into rioters, attacking are residents who had gathered to watch the spectacle and protect their homes and belongings. Hours later, police arrived in riot gear, deployed tear gas, and eventually dispersed the crowds, restoring a fragile, heavily policed calm to the neighborhood.

Three days after the procession-turned-riot, a demolition squad arrived in Jahangirpuri unannounced, sent by the North Delhi Municipal Corporation along with nine bulldozers and around 1,500 police officers to demolish the homes and shops of Jahangirpuri’s mostly Muslim residents. Activists rushed to the Delhi High Court to file a petition and secure a stay order, yet the demolitions continued for another two days, as if court injunctions were mere background noise rather than constitutional guardrails.

Officials framed the demolitions as neutral enforcement against “illegal constructions,” alleging that the Jahangirpuri residents involved in the riot were living in unauthorized structures that could lawfully be torn down. Since around 2014, when Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) returned to power nationally, evictions targeting informally housed Muslims have proliferated in Delhi and across North India, defended as routine action against encroachment and disorder to deflect from the targeted violence.

Yet these demolition campaigns have not gone uncontested. Local activists, neighborhood organizations, and national Muslim groups have used public interest litigation and emergency petitions to halt them, forcing government officials and police to answer to courts as well as higher ranking party officials. Opposition politicians have also intervened directly on site – standing in front of demolition machines, brandishing stay orders, and turning demolition drives into scenes of interscalar confrontation between national ruling parties, municipal authorities, and urban constituencies.

Proponents and sympathetic politicians have labeled this practice “Bulldozer Justice,” celebrating it as swift, decisive, and exemplary. India’s Supreme Court has condemned such demolitions as unconstitutional, violating due process and the fundamental rights of citizens, yet the tactic persists, and the bulldozer – freshly painted and draped in saffron flags – has become a potent symbol of Hindu nationalism and an icon of muscular state power directed against urban “enemies within.”

Bringing the Border into the City

Jahangirpuri is not an isolated case but part of a broader pattern in which national governments and political party officials are deploying military and border technologies against their own cities and domestic urban populations. Across Indian states, demolition squads, police units, and paramilitary forces are being used to enforce land-use regulations, zoning ordinances, and building codes with war‑like tactics, without investigations or the meaningful burden of proof. These violent dispossessions are frequently justified through the language of national security and territorial defense, with residents depicted as “illegal Bangladeshis” inhabiting “mini Pakistans”—labels that relocate border anxieties into the heart of the city.

In the United States, immigration enforcement offers a parallel script as ICE and Border Patrol raids move far beyond formal border zones and into workplaces, schools, and residential neighborhoods. These raids mobilize armored vehicles, tactical gear, and militarized formations to arrest people framed as “unauthorized,” usually without the opportunity to contest detention and removal. The invocation of illegality – of undocumented migration, unauthorized construction, or encroachment – creates a pliable category that render minoritized urban residents as always deportable, always evictable, and always subject to legitimate use of violence.

These practices exemplify what might be understood as urbanization of border enforcement: the extension of border techniques, logics, and affects into ordinary city spaces. The border becomes less a distant line on the map but an apparatus that can be activated on demand in neighborhoods, markets, and informal settlements, selectively enclosing some residents while casting others as threats to the nation.

Urban Warfare and the Multiscalar State

North India’s demolition drives, like ongoing immigration raids in U.S. cities, are targeted campaigns against scapegoatable populations whose dispossession generates immediate political gain. In both contexts, majoritarian and ethnonationalist politics have spent decades constructing Muslims, migrants, and the urban poor as dangerous outsiders, even long‑term residents and citizens. Violent urban spectacles – bulldozers razing Muslim‑owned shops, agents dragging workers from factories, riots followed by demolitions – have become opportunities to demonstrate loyalty to a national “people” imagined as rural, exurban, and culturally homogenous.

Yet the political calculations extend beyond populist cruelty, constituting authoritarian responses to the sovereignty challenges posed by cities and local democratic politics. Informal regimes of housing and labor, which constitute the dominant mode of urban life in many parts of the Global South, produce residents who are structurally precarious and therefore easily displaced or dispossessed. At the same time, these regimes are sustained by complex local power configurations: municipal bureaucracies, party networks, NGOs, religious organizations, and neighborhood intermediaries that govern everyday life and access to resources.

Crossing scales of the neighborhood, the city, and the region, these localized constellations challenge and often actively undermine the agendas of nationalist leaders and ruling parties. With cities generating internal, subnational challenges to ascendant autocrats who seek to assert undivided sovereignty in the name of a national people and a unified territorial state, the deployment of war‑like tactics against urban residents serves to discipline local political officials, reassert central authority, and remind cities that their authority is contingent and revocable.

And yet, these incursions are never one‑sided. Legal challenges, rights campaigns, and neighborhood‑level organizing, from Delhi’s Jahangirpuri to smaller cities in Uttar Pradesh where violent campaigns of “bulldozer justice” are underway, constitute vital counterpublics insisting on due process and asserting occupancy or kabza, while operating within highly uneven terrains of risk and power.

Old Repertoires, New Boldness

Yet the militarization of city‑making is not new. In India, the demolition of informal settlements has long been a tool in the state’s repertoire of rule. During the Emergency of the mid‑1970s – often regarded as the darkest period for Indian democracy – as constitutional protections were suspended, government bulldozers demolished the homes of an estimated 700,000 urban residents in Delhi alone. Since the colonial city making of the British raj, the urban has been a key site of revolutionary struggle and violent repression, embedding patterns of spatial control and collective punishment in the institutions and governing repertoires of the postcolonial state.

What feels new today is not the use of violence but its brazen visibility and normalization. Decades of neoliberal urban reforms, privatization, and “world‑class” city-making projects have made forced eviction, slum demolitions, and aggressive policing routine features of urban life. Against this backdrop, the further intensification of state violence against the urban poor, Muslims, and migrants can appear as business as usual – a continuation rather than a rupture, even when bulldozers arrive flanked by hundreds of police in riot gear.

Hyper‑inequality, segregation, and proliferating “cities of walls” have enabled the dehumanization of the urban residents targeted in these campaigns. Physical distance and social separation make it easier for urban middle‑classes to accept, ignore, or even applaud the violent spectacles unfolding in neighborhoods they will never visit. At the same time, long‑term shifts toward more aggressive policing – SWAT‑style raids, militarized crowd control, routine use of armored vehicles – have accustomed publics to seeing domestic law enforcement adopt the posture and technologies of war.

In India, these struggles have unfolded against the backdrop of three decades of local democratic reforms, underpinned by the 74th Constitutional Amendment, which promised a measure of urban self‑government but left municipal powers and finances largely at the discretion of state governments. But while largely failing to give voice to precarious urban residents and workers, these reforms have gradually empowered aspects of urban local governance, both middle class and elites affirming bourgeois property claims and the civil society organizations and local political parties constituting potential, if fragile, sites of resistance to bulldozer politics.

Open questions for urban research

These dynamics raise important empirical and conceptual questions for urban studies. How should we theorize the relationship between the multiscalar state and national incursions of military power in cities? How are neighborhood politics being reconfigured by bulldozers and border patrols confronting longstanding if fragile negotiated arrangements among local parties, bureaucrats, brokers, and residents?

There are also questions about temporality and repetition. If authoritarian states have long used cities as laboratories of repression, what distinguishes the current moment? Is it the density and frequency of violent incursions, the forms of media circulation that turn demolitions into shareable spectacles, or the combination of authoritarian and neoliberal techniques in the governance of land and housing? And how do new technologies – from digital surveillance to predictive policing – intersect with older instruments like bulldozers and batons to produce an urbanization of warfare that is at once familiar and disturbingly novel?

Finally, these events compel us to rethink resistance and solidarity in deeply unequal cities. In Jahangirpuri and other sites of bulldozer incursions, activists, lawyers, municipal councilors, and neighborhood committees mobilize courts and the media to challenge demolitions, even as machines continue to move in defiance of judicial orders. Tracing these violent incursions only as assertions of authoritarian power risks missing the political work of those who are contesting them – the lawyers, municipal councilors, neighborhood committees, and urban social movements empowered by decades of reform, attempting to retain sovereignty in constitutional procedure and local democratic claims to the city.

Attending to these struggles – and to the everyday work to maintain homes, livelihoods, and neighborhoods in the shadow of bulldozers and police raids – reminds us that cities remain crucial terrains for challenging authoritarian projects. As autocrats and ethnonationalist movements transform urban spaces into internal frontiers of warfare, city residents, municipal actors, and translocal networks continue to experiment with alternative forms of solidarity, governance, and power that unsettle the very claims to exclusive sovereignty that urban warfare is meant to secure.

About Liza Weinstein

Liza Weinstein researches and teaches on urban inequality, state power, and the politics of housing, displacement, and urban informality, with a regional focus on India and comparative global perspectives.